BALTIMORE (AP) — Nendah Tarke's 24 points helped Towson defeat Morgan State 64-60 on Sunday night. Tarke added seven rebounds for the Tigers (4-2). Tomiwa Sulaiman scored 10 points and grabbed six rebounds. Christian May scored nine. The Bears (3-5) were led in scoring by Wynston Tabbs with 19 points. Kameron Hobbs had 13 points and Ahmarie Simpkins finished with nine points, three steals and two blocks. Towson went into halftime leading Morgan State 35-26. Tarke scored 14 points in the half. Towson used a 7-0 run in the second half to build an 11-point lead at 58-47 with 5:51 left in the half before finishing off the win. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .
The vote came amid controversy about the pools' futures West Lancashire council leaders have weathered a 'no confidence' vote over the future of swimming pools in Skelmersdale and Ormskirk . However, three Labour councillors have now become independent due to the dispute over whether to close swimming pools in the two towns. One councillor said during a full council debate this week that any potential closures without replacements would be a 'betrayal of both towns'. Labour councillors Yvonne Gagen, the council leader, and Carl Coughlan, who is responsible for leisure services, were targeted in a 'no confidence' motion by the Our West Lancashire (OWL) group. However, Labour councillors dismissed these accusations. Outside the council building, some pool protesters gathered again, albeit in smaller numbers than in October. These included members of the Ormskirk Otters swimming club. The vote took place amidst controversy about the future of the pools, a recent public consultation by West Lancashire Council, and the backdrop of a new budget due next year. One proposal is to close the two existing pools before any replacements are built, as a cost-saving measure. Government cuts and rising costs are among the factors cited, but there are counter-claims of poor work by councillors, reports Lancs Live . The council is also seeking new design ideas after two recent blueprints were deemed unaffordable. Above-ground steel pools could be a cheaper option, a previous meeting heard, but a final decision has not yet been made. OWL Cllr Adrian Owens, proposing a 'no confidence' motion, said: "This reflects the wishes and opinions of local residents. It is local people who elect us and who we should listen to." He added: "I've been a councillor for 25 years. I've never seen the levels of anger and contempt for the council that I see at this time. I can't recall a petition being presented with so many signatures nor has there ever been a council consultation bringing anywhere close to 2,178 responses. This anger stretches across traditional political lines." Cllr Owens continued, regarding the situation with leisure services: "The council leader and lead member for leisure are driving us off the cliff top. It is time for a change of leadership before this council ends up the only one in the area with no council-operated swimming pools." Speaking on consultant spending and the council's leadership Cllr Owens concluded: "Residents have lost all confidence in him. He has consistently taken a he-knows-best approach, refusing to listen to other political groups or involve them in cross-party working groups. As a result, the council has spent more than £1.7m in the past 12 months on leisure consultants, much of it on two new leisure centre designs which are now deemed unaffordable." Furthermore, he claimed: "He has also starved the existing centres of investment. Nothing has been spent for four years and only £26,000 in the past decade. Then he has the cheek to use the alleged poor condition as a reason for closure." The OWL motion garnered support from Conservatives, including Robert Bailey and David Westley, with Cllr Westley saying: "We had a cross-party working group on leisure for six or eight years. But it was stopped 12 months ago. We tried to get it reinstated in May. The council leadership, honestly, needs help. There is a lack of control. Unfortunately there's lack of confidence in both of you." Former Labour councillors Neil Furey, Paul Hogan, and Kerry Lloyd have become independents due to the pools controversy. Cllr Furey said: "Make no mistake, community anger over potential closures is unbelievable. I hope we will hear some changes tonight. But this would be the ultimate betrayal of Ormskirk and Skelmersdale. People are up in arms, including teaching staff and governors. This cannot happen. There must be alternatives." Labour's Gareth Dowling, deputy council leader, said: "We've had about 15 minutes of slagging from the opposition and independents. You can check back on details. To say these councillors have been expelled from Labour is wrong. I suggest we move to a vote because nobody is going to change their minds." The OWL motion was ultimately defeated by a narrow margin of 23 votes to 21.As a Raiders owner, Tom Brady will need to tread lightly when mentoring Michigan quarterbacks
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COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork said Thursday that he is "absolutely" confident that Ryan Day will be back as football coach in 2025. Calls to fire the sixth-year coach rose among Ohio State fans after the Buckeyes lost to Michigan for the fourth straight year. Bjork, in an interview on 97.1 The Fan, said Day is the man for the job, regardless of how the Buckeyes perform in the College Football Playoff. They host Tennessee in a first-round game Dec. 21. "Coach Day is awesome," said Bjork, who came from Texas A&M to replace the retiring Gene Smith last summer. "He's great to work with. He totally gets it. He loves being a Buckeye. So, we're going to support him at the highest level." The 13-10 loss to Michigan followed by an ugly melee between the teams put the coach in a precarious spot. He and his team were booed off the field by the home fans. Bjork ended up releasing a statement expressing his support for the coach. People are also reading... "The reason we had to say something after (the Michigan) game is, we're still breathing, we're still alive," Bjork said. "The season's not over. The book is not closed." Thanks to the playoff, Day has a chance to redeem himself with Ohio State's huge fanbase with a win against the Volunteers — and perhaps more in the 12-team tournament. Regardless of what happens, Day will be back next year, according to Bjork. "Coach Day and I just hit it off so well," Bjork said. "I've been really, really impressed. Every single time I talked to him, I learn something. He's innovative. He recruits at the highest level. He's got a great staff." Day wouldn't directly address his job status last weekend. "When you first come off those types of things, there's a lot of emotion," he said, referring to the Michigan loss. "And then as time goes on, you've got to get refocused because you know what you've done in the past does not affect what's going on moving forward. Everything is out in front of us." Failing to consistently beat Michigan is one of the few flaws in Day's coaching record. Hired as a member of coach Urban Meyer's staff in 2017, Day was the hand-picked successor when Meyer retired after the 2018 season. Compiling an overall 66-10 record, he is widely admired in the coaching community. "Great respect for what he's done in his coaching career, what he's done there at Ohio State and the success that they've had year-in and year-out," Tennessee coach Josh Heupel said. Day is in trouble now because losing The Game is considered an unforgiveable sin by Buckeyes fans. "What we have to do is this whole 'championship or bust' mentality, you want that as the goal, but it has to be about the process," Bjork said. "To me, we've got to maybe change some conversations a little bit. I think we need to maybe just approach things a little bit differently." Get local news delivered to your inbox!It looked like a recipe for disaster. So, when his country's swimmers were being accused of doping earlier this year, one Chinese official cooked up something fast. He blamed it on contaminated noodles. In fact, he argued, it could have been a culinary conspiracy concocted by criminals, whose actions led to the cooking wine used to prepare the noodles being laced with a banned heart drug that found its way into an athlete's system. This theory was spelled out to international anti-doping officials during a meeting and, after weeks of wrangling, finally made it into the thousands of pages of data handed over to the lawyer who investigated the case involving 23 Chinese swimmers who had tested positive for that same drug. The attorney, appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency, refused to consider that scenario as he sifted through the evidence. In spelling out his reasoning, lawyer Eric Cottier paid heed to the half-baked nature of the theory. People are also reading... "The Investigator considers this scenario, which he has described in the conditional tense, to be possible, no less, no more," Cottier wrote. Even without the contaminated-noodles theory, Cottier found problems with the way WADA and the Chinese handled the case but ultimately determined WADA had acted reasonably in not appealing China's conclusion that its athletes had been inadvertently contaminated. Critics of the way the China case was handled can't help but wonder if a wider exploration of the noodle theory, details of which were discovered by The Associated Press via notes and emails from after the meeting where it was delivered, might have lent a different flavor to Cottier's conclusions. "There are more story twists to the ways the Chinese explain the TMZ case than a James Bond movie," said Rob Koehler, the director general of the advocacy group Global Athlete. "And all of it is complete fiction." Something in the kitchen was contaminated In April, reporting from the New York Times and the German broadcaster ARD revealed that the 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for the banned heart medication trimetazidine, also known as TMZ. China's anti-doping agency determined the athletes had been contaminated, and so, did not sanction them. WADA accepted that explanation, did not press the case further, and China was never made to deliver a public notice about the "no-fault findings," as is often seen in similar cases. The stock explanation for the contamination was that traces of TMZ were found in the kitchen of a hotel where the swimmers were staying. In his 58-page report, Cottier relayed some suspicions about the feasibility of that chain of events — noting that WADA's chief scientist "saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities." But without evidence to support pursuing the case, and with the chance of winning an appeal at almost nil, Cottier determined WADA's "decision not to appeal appears indisputably reasonable." But how did the drugs get into the kitchen? A mystery remained: How did those traces of TMZ get into the kitchen? Shortly after the doping positives were revealed, the Institute of National Anti-Doping Organizations held a meeting on April 30 where it heard from the leader of China's agency, Li Zhiquan. Li's presentation was mostly filled with the same talking points that have been delivered throughout the saga — that the positive tests resulted from contamination from the kitchen. But he expanded on one way the kitchen might have become contaminated, harkening to another case in China involving a low-level TMZ positive. A pharmaceutical factory, he explained, had used industrial alcohol in the distillation process for producing TMZ. The industrial alcohol laced with the drug "then entered the market through illegal channels," he said. The alcohol "was re-used by the perpetrators to process and produce cooking wine, which is an important seasoning used locally to make beef noodles," Li said. "The contaminated beef noodles were consumed by that athlete, resulting in an extremely low concentration of TMZ in the positive sample. "The wrongdoers involved have been brought to justice." New information sent to WADA ... eventually This new information raised eyebrows among the anti-doping leaders listening to Li's report. So much so that over the next month, several emails ensued to make sure the details about the noodles and wine made their way to WADA lawyers, who could then pass it onto Cottier. Eventually, Li did pass on the information to WADA general counsel Ross Wenzel and, just to be sure, one of the anti-doping leaders forwarded it, as well, according to the emails seen by the AP. All this came with Li's request that the noodles story be kept confidential. Turns out, it made it into Cottier's report, though he took the information with a grain of salt. "Indeed, giving it more attention would have required it to be documented, then scientifically verified and validated," he wrote. Neither Wenzel nor officials at the Chinese anti-doping agency returned messages from AP asking about the noodles conspiracy and the other athlete who Li suggested had been contaminated by them. Meanwhile, 11 of the swimmers who originally tested positive competed at the Paris Games earlier this year in a meet held under the cloud of the Chinese doping case. Though WADA considers the case closed, Koehler and others point to situations like this as one of many reasons that an investigation by someone other than Cottier, who was hired by WADA, is still needed. "It gives the appearance that people are just making things up as they go along on this, and hoping the story just goes away," Koehler said. "Which clearly it has not." Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!None
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'It was a hidden gem in the county': St. Thomas patients look for alternate solutions as STEGH therapy pool remains closedSOUTHAMPTON, England, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca enjoyed the sound of the travelling supporters chanting his name as his side romped to a 5-1 Premier League win at Southampton on Wednesday. Maresca's side were 4-1 up late in the game, when the away section sang his name as they celebrated Chelsea's impressive victory which moved them to second in the standings and the manager applauded the chants which made them even louder. "It was a very good feeling. You can see they are happy, that is our target, we work every day to keep them happy," Maresca told a press conference. "Tonight was a very good feeling. They can see Chelsea is back and this is an important thing." Maresca took over a Chelsea side who finished sixth last season under Mauricio Pochettino, and their impressive form has put them nine points ahead of where they were at this stage of the previous campaign. Chelsea are also excelling in Europe, top of the Conference League standings with four wins from four, and they are now unbeaten in five league games. "I think it's a good feeling, not only for the owners but for the players, club and the fans. A good feeling for all of us," Maresca said. "The results, for sure, help us a lot to calm down noise around the club." Maresca was able to make seven changes from the side which beat Aston Villa 3-0 at the weekend, with keeper Filip Jorgensen making his first Premier League appearance, although Maresca said that Robert Sanchez would return for the next game. Maresca was not entirely satisfied with the whole performance, however, especially after they allowed Southampton to equalise so soon after taking the lead. "I am very happy with the five we scored. I'm not happy with the first 20 minutes where we struggled," he said. "We prepared to press them man-to-man and we did not do that. After 15 or 20 minutes, we adjusted that and the game was much better." Sign up here. Reporting by Trevor Stynes, editing by Ed Osmond Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab